Like thousands of foreigners in the late 1990s, Chookeat Khumyam and Uraiwan Wirunchiwa left their native country when a U.S. employer offered them a taste of America's boomtime prosperity.

The two Thai nationals entered the United States under a visa arranged by their employer, a gourmet Thai restaurant in Portland.

But when they tried to get a better-paying job nearly five years later, the couple discovered that their legal status in the United States depended largely on that employer -- along with the fickle U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In December, the Portland-based Typhoon restaurant chain turned the couple in to INS agents after they quit work to move -- legally, they thought -- to better jobs. The INS accused them of violating their visas, jailed them for four days and began deportation proceedings.

On Thursday evening, rather than fight deportation, the couple planned to board a plane to return to Thailand for good. Before leaving, they sued Typhoon, alleging the well-known restaurant chain violated federal anti-discrimination and overtime laws.

Typhoon's secretary-treasurer, Steve Kline, said he's confident the lawsuit's claims will be proven baseless. He said the restaurant did nothing to abuse its cooks.

Immigration experts say the couple's case and allegations raise troubling questions about the nation's work-visa programs -- which ballooned in popularity in the late 1990s -- and the rights of foreign nationals trying to become permanent residents.

"When you have people who are so very badly interested in coming here to stay permanently, and they're dependent on an employer to provide them with that opportunity, it just lends itself to the employer taking advantage of the employee," said Jessica Vaughan, senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C. "It's a category that's set up for abuse like this."

Interviews and a review of the couple's immigration records suggest that Typhoon exerted far more power over the couple than it could over U.S. citizens.

Typhoon recruited the Thai couple in 1998 using treaty-investor visas known as E-2 visas.

The visa program is designed to spur foreign investment and create jobs for Americans. It enables investors from countries with U.S. treaties to bring highly skilled workers to America, provided the investors show the skills are essential and unavailable domestically. E-2 visa holders can stay as long as they work for their sponsors.

The number of E-2 visas swelled 39 percent -- from 19,103 to 26,496 -- between 1995 and 2002, the State Department said.

Kline, whose wife is a Thai national, said Typhoon needed chefs from Thailand because extensive recruiting in the United States failed to produce qualified cooks. At the time of its initial application for treaty-investor status, the restaurant pledged to hire U.S. residents as prep cooks and train them eventually to replace cooks recruited from Thailand. Today, the restaurant employs 30 cooks with work visas at its five restaurants in the Seattle and Portland areas, Kline said.

In 1998, Khumyam and Wirunchiwa, then strangers, were working for five-star Bangkok hotels when they answered Typhoon's newspaper ads for line cooks in 1998. The restaurant offered to cover their airfare to the United States, among other expenses, and pay a salary of $1,600 a month -- four times their Thai earnings.

Jobs lead to marriage

Hired indefinitely, they each signed a noncompete agreement barring them from working at other Thai restaurants within 50 miles of Portland or Seattle for three years if they should ever leave Typhoon.

They met at Typhoon on Broadway, married in 2000 and had a son this past August.

Two years into their jobs here, Typhoon began helping the couple, along with three other cooks, apply for green cards to give them permanent residency and freedom to work anywhere in the United States. The restaurant later offered to advance them an unspecified sum to help with their green card application and legal fees.

In exchange, Typhoon asked the cooks to sign a contract requiring them to work there five years. If they left early, the contract would require them to repay three times the advance sum and cover the costs of recruiting replacements -- $8,000 to $10,000 each, according to Kline. Even after five years, workers would have to repay Typhoon up to half of the advance.

When the cooks refused to sign, Typhoon notified the INS that it wanted to withdraw its support for the couple's application in February 2001. The INS acknowledged the request in April 2001.

But the INS inexplicably continued processing the couple's applications, inviting them to its offices to be fingerprinted in March and August 2002. In October, the agency issued them work-authorization cards that permitted them to work anywhere for one year.

The couple quit in November and planned to work for Raymond Billings, who was opening a Thai restaurant in Astoria. Khumyam said Billings offered to pay him $2,500 a month, limit his workweek to 40 hours, pay for an apartment in Astoria and employ Wirunchiwa as well.

"I thought it would be very good for me because I'd have time to take care of my kid," Khumyam said.

But in the meantime, they wanted to send their 4-month-old son with a relative to Thailand while they helped start the restaurant.

Restaurant calls for arrest

When Kline learned of the travel plan, he sent the INS a four-page letter marked "URGENT" on Dec. 8 that asked the agency to arrest the couple at the airport.

"We feel we are witnessing the escalation of a problem which eventually could compromise, or even destroy our company," Kline wrote. "And because we are in a type of 'partnership' with immigration officials, doing our best to comply with U.S. laws, we believe that if we have a problem, it suggests INS enforcement will also soon have a problem."

On Dec. 10, the INS denied the couple's green card application. It arrested them two days later.

The couple were detained at Portland International Airport as they handed off their son. Bo Kline, Typhoon's president and executive chef and Steve Kline's wife, showed up at the airport to translate.

"If I think about it," Khumyam said of his time in jail, "I want to run away from Typhoon."

Immigration attorneys say the INS usually doesn't immediately arrest foreigners whose green card applications are denied. Normally, violators are asked to appear before a judge, then often allowed to leave voluntarily.

"It sounds like the INS was a little heavy-handed," said Steve Yale-Loehr, an adjunct law professor at Cornell University who co-authored a legal handbook on immigration law. "It looks like there's some blame to go all the way around in this case."

INS spokesman Ed Sale said agents arrested the couple because Typhoon had withdrawn its support for the couple's green card and deemed them a flight risk.

Sale said he could not explain why the INS continued processing the couple's green card application after Typhoon withdrew its support in 2001.

Lawyer questions action

Immigration lawyers said it was troubling that the INS denied the application only two days after Typhoon demanded the arrest.

"The part that bugs me is why is the immigration service acting as the lackey doing the dirty work for Typhoon," said Bob Donaldson, an attorney with Portland-based Black Helterline who's practiced immigration law for 27 years and represents other Thai restaurants. "It seems like Typhoon used the INS for their own purpose."

Steve Kline said Typhoon sought the couple's arrest to avoid jeopardizing the company's privilege of using the special visas. Kline said it also wanted to make sure the Thai cooks didn't set an example for other employees who might try to leave Typhoon to work illegally elsewhere.

"It's not a case of a vendetta," Kline said. "It's a case of there are laws to be followed. When they chose to leave Typhoon, which they're certainly entitled to do, we don't run a slave ship . . . they're required to leave the country."

Baolin Chen, the couple's immigration attorney in Portland, contends the INS ignored a law signed in October 2000 by President Clinton that allows work-visa holders to switch jobs if their green card applications have been pending for more than six months. Congress passed the law to prevent employers from holding workers hostage if competitors offer them jobs.

Other immigration lawyers disagree on whether the new law should have applied in the couple's case, and the INS has not issued guidance on interpreting it.

"It's a gray area," Cornell's Yale-Loehr said.

Three immigration experts also said Typhoon's use of the E-2 visas appeared outside their original goal: to seed an enterprise with foreign expertise that U.S. citizen workers could acquire. They said they've never heard of 30 E-2 visas issued to a 150-worker business.

They also found Typhoon's contract requirements excessive. Most green card agreements seek commitments of only one or two years and no penalties beyond recovery of expenses, they said.

"If the cost is so onerous, then basically it's a modest style of indentured servitude, which is fundamentally wrong," said Donaldson, the Portland attorney.

Kline cites expenses

Steve Kline said Typhoon was merely trying to protect its investment in employees. The green card application process cost $20,000 to $25,000 for all five cooks, he said.

In the couple's employment lawsuit, filed Jan. 21 in U.S. District Court in Portland, they allege Typhoon broke its promises to reimburse their original visa expenses and pay certain bonuses.

The suit says the restaurant illegally classified them as exempt from overtime laws and worked them on average 10 hours a day, six days a week, without overtime pay.

Khumyam said he often did nothing but work and sleep, sometimes turning in 13-hour days. On Wednesdays, when the restaurant received food shipments, he said, he frequently worked through his three-hour afternoon break to prepare and store the food.

The suit says Typhoon at times threatened the couple with deportation, particularly after they refused to sign the contract.

Kline said the cooks worked 5-1/2 days a week, but he would not detail their hours. He declined in light of the pending lawsuit to comment otherwise on specific allegations.

The couple see little reason to fight about their U.S. status.

Although Billings, the would-be Astoria restaurateur, posted a bond to get the couple out of Columbia County Jail, he stopped returning their calls, their attorney said, and apparently no longer plans to open the restaurant. He could not be reached for comment.

The couple said they doubted they could be hired elsewhere in Portland after signing Typhoon's noncompete agreement, which it has attempted to enforce in court in at least one instance.

With no job, the couple decided Jan. 23 to drop their deportation challenge and leave voluntarily. A judge gave them until May 23.

Their attorney said the couple were consoled by the prospect of celebrating the Chinese new year back home with their family.

"They're happy because they're going to see their son soon," Chen said. "They just want to get out of this."